Events+Lectures

Histories of Violence: Killing, Communication and Memory in United Italy

Professor David Forgacs, New York University

Wednesday, September 27, 2017

Episodes of public violence have recurred at several key moments in the formation and consolidation of the modern Italian state: wars of unification, colonial wars, labor protests and social unrest repressed by police or the military, civil conflicts during the rise and subsequent fall of fascism, terrorism, stragismo, mafia violence. The lecture examines the long history of violence in contemporary Italy, from 1848 to 2015, and suggests that several of these instances of public violence are linked to problems of legitimation of political authority. The lecture looks also at the communication and transmission of memory in connecting or separating different moments of violence, as well as at the near-total erasure of certain episodes of mass violence from the historical record.